ESSAY | Why Bother with the Books? – Mia Cresswell-Melstrøm

Sipping on our black coffee, my grandad and I sit together in his living room every morning. We drift between comfortable silence, where I return to my book, he returns to his paper, and short bursts of conversation. A new restaurant is opening in town, he says. I called the bank earlier, I say. What time do you start work, he asks. Yes, I will remember my umbrella, I respond.

ONE POEM – Adrienne Weiss

I find a seat,
hold a headache in my hands, cradle it like a rock
between fingers, think about how this birthday
will be soup and crackers and cancelled plans.

COMFORT FOODS // Sik Fan – Kimi Canete

In my earliest memories, I am eating Chinese food. My great-aunt’s house in the suburbs outside Boston is split-level and her mother, my great-grandmother, lives in the lower level. You enter through the front door onto a landing between the two halves of the house, and if you walk downstairs, her kitchen will be directly in front of you.

TWO POEMS – Chloe Hanks

I remember the shape of the word rainbow
on her puckered mouth, how we sounded
it out from my bedroom window.

ONE POEM – John Dorroh

How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.

COMFORT FOODS // The Taste of Forgiveness – Sarah Islam

We are three siblings, scattered across continents, each of us carrying the taste of a different kitchen.

ONE POEM – Morgan Boyer

Rain upon me your turbulent tales of locker-side loves,
the gossip of girls whose braces still encase their molars

COMFORT FOODS // Gulyás – Liam Skillen

I look at a photo of my Hungarian grandfather and his compatriots in Carr Bank Park, posing by the flowerbeds on Woodhouse Road, and know it is possible to belong to more than a single place. 

ONE POEM – Erin Vance

Just as Hemlock
digs its graves in the
carrot family plot

ONE POEM – Alex Stolis

because there’s no way he would ever find it,
being interested only in dinner/work/breakfast
/work/sex on demand/sleep/work.

COMFORT FOODS // Overheard at Terasa Obor – Ana Prundaru

the problem with mici is
they’re all so good
that they don’t even ask you
what you’re ordering

ONE POEM – Elizabeth Seven

So next time you feel so anxious that you can hardly unlock the door,
remember that the world holds your feet

TWO POEMS – KG Newman

First day of the World Series,
autumn hanging on, each tree
seeing who can keep from
being a skeleton the longest

COMFORT FOODS // Bombay Toast – Samarth Agarwal

I see you standing there – starch white lungi draped
7AM freshly shaved – wooden spoon in hand
Commanding your caramelising populace.

ONE POEM – Emilie Delcourt

one bright red strawberry on the strawberry plant

mist still low, tangled in the branches of olive trees

the way the pomegranates hang low
with the burden of their own weight

Flash Fiction | Salvage — Ian C Smith

Faces are remembered, words spoken; that brief encounter at the fair, the smell of old sunlight, a slow night train.

ONE POEM – Brian Alkire

That albino slug
looks like mobile marzipan,
bending its neck for a nap
in the stitchwort
tufted beside the road.

ONE POEM – Paul Bavister

You slid the nit comb through my hair
then rinsed and laughed about how
you loved hunting them down

ONE POEM – Harriet Sandilands 

legs floating, brush of seaweed 
bulging water moves us 
up and down 
the shore seems very far away 

ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg

I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.

FLASH FICTION | Blue Pieces of Sky – Mikki Aronoff

Stevie busies himself trying to match two blue pieces of sky. You watch him working the corners and the glands in your throat swell.

ONE POEM – Miriam Ashford

If you walk along a path
between forest and shore
between grains eroded by the sea
they were mountains once

INTERVIEW | Artist Mimi Kunz

I found that writing and art keep me sane, they’re like a room of my own in a time when I’m rarely alone.

TWO POEMS – Stephanie Powell

Am I livestock or the boning knife?
Amongst the timid lambs, half-dreaming

FICTION | Rooms: A Love Letter – Annemarie McCarthy

Inside the atoms of the cavity block extension live the remnants of a thousand John Players.

FICTION | Bruises – Keenan Lew

They say a lot of the work of being poly is scheduling. When I say ‘they’ I mean smug influencers with poorly produced podcasts, and when I say ‘being poly’ I hate myself.

ONE POEM – Marianne Habeshaw

My family observes the emu cage. Beaks so vengeful, I realise we’re taking the piss.

ONE POEM – C.W.Bryan

I first saw her walking,
the folds of her ink blue dress
turning the earth;

POETRY IN TRANSLATION – Bartosz Konstrat, tr. Dawid Mobolaji

But from time to time it does exist. Something like a stray lash under the eyelid
trying to catch its last breath.

TWO POEMS – Cara L. McKee

at least the colour I’m told is
robin’s egg blue, like
boy-baby blankets, like
deep breaths of sunshine.

ONE POEM – Susan G. Byron

It’s these questions I have. (An astral whodunnit: a whydreamit).

ONE POEM – Atma Frans

They’re small animals
wriggling to get out

Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle

ONE POEM – Satya Bosman

I know it’s over when I picture the train carriage
it’s an old-fashioned carriage with burgundy velvet seats
a little room in my memory.

ONE POEM – Finlay Worallo

You are sun-skinned, but my half
of the planet is tumbling into the dark.

DIGITAL ART – IJWBAA

Family is my way of honouring the Filipino spirit, where the bond of unity, the guidance of elders, and the hope carried by the younger generation come together to form a love that is simple, yet profound—one that transcends individuality and connects us all.

ONE POEM – J.M.Summers

It is an old superstition.
The mirror, and the room
dark behind it but for the
flickering of a few fading
candles.

COMFORT FOODS // Cooke’s Pie & Mash Shop – Jonella Vidal

My memories can be quantified in cups of tea,
and meat pies filled perfectly, slumped against
a mountain of mash

ONE POEM – Jonny Rodgers

Like thirst – a need to quench, slake, state:
first hearse, first coffin and pallbearing.

TWO POEMS – Vanessa Napolitano

I become great at darts, a phenomenon
on dart circuits, earning enough from darts
to pay for lobster rolls

TWO POEMS – Hana Wilde

maybe they look down
at their bodies as they left them

in neat rows, heads of wheat
crackling green and gold

FICTION | Summer Buzz 1960 – Anne Irwin

She arms herself with the metal pipe of the Electrolux
with the precision of a marksman

ONE POEM – Steven Brisendine

(coffee, pastry,
food-words,
unfettered time)

TWO POEMS – Elliot Ruff

Words words words black as a cat. 
I just saw you in the periphery of 
Manet’s Olympia — or maybe Cézanne’s

COMFORT FOODS // Ode to the Palta – Ulrike Durán Bravo

…across the bitter world, a sweet gift from Pachamama
like my father who taught me to feel
and press its skin: a map of lost worlds

ESSAY | Corn and Chicken and Death and The Return – Alan Weltzien

The fact that we’d never visited Mexico apart from a couple of long-ago weeks in Tulum, Yucatan might explain my scanty knowledge of El Dia de Los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. I knew it wasn’t connected to Ireland’s Samhain or All Hallow’s Eve, beloved in my childhood.

Flash Fiction | Ouroboros — Leyda Mar

Our traveling was so fluid it’s like we lived nowhere in particular.